This looks like a good place to start…

From Occupy Cleveland’s Daily Digest:

Non-perishable items asked for. Not just bread and crackers–some people rely on this food and it is good to provide tasty food that can last for a long time outside so that it can be eaten without having to arrange for ice, etc. Donations of warm prepared food always welcome, though.

Discussion of this at Monday’s GA. For the next four days we came to concensus to allow $50 for use for food for tent people although it is unclear how this is going to be procured and disbursed. Proposal for longer-term solution still under negotiation.

And the needs page is a good place to regularly check in…

Tim Russo writes:

I don’t know if this FB group even works anymore, but it’s the easiest way I know to reach out to the strongest supporters of my campaign in 2010. Thank you all again for your support, and helping to run an incredible race. I really still want those 12 votes to come ahead of Levin. Really.

As many of you know, I’ve been heavily involved in Occupy Cleveland since October. I understand why people comfortable supporting me for public office might feel uncomfortable about getting involved with OWS. The arrival of winter has removed all of those obstacles. OC is moving indoors largely, entering a hibernation, reorganization, and rejuvenation period, expecting to blast off further in the spring. It’s now essentially organizing, office work, phone work, planning, you know – stuff we tried to do and often failed at! But stuff we did well enough to get 730 votes, largely in white, middle class, neighborhoods filled with cops and sheriff employees.

The best people in OC have self-selected, with time off for long breaks, into a winter of hard slogging. There are no more moths around a media flame, largely because now, it’s work, and months of it ahead.

What OC, and OWS need now, and would welcome like lost family, Continue Reading »

This was my favorite bit:

Wayne Gretzky often talked about the role his father played in developing his skating and stick handling skills. He spent hours and hours with Walter on the backyard rink. But not all top earners got to where they are because of this sort of good nepotism. I somehow doubt that James Murdoch is the Wayne Gretzky of the publishing world.

Could these be the college educated young people the Michigan Municipal League thinks its attracting?

Max Read writes:

This audience regards the Style section as a collection of dispatches from a different universe; a universe where some of the most horrible and insufferable people on the planet are treated as visionaries and geniuses. A rich universe.

The Times is aware of this. It reads the comments. And it understands that as a strategy to drive pageviews, trolling has a long and time-honored history. Articles like this are designed to elicit head shakes and eye rolls. Look at its tactics:

Breathless descriptions: “[S]helves of yellowing volumes of Dostoyevsky and Camus reaching to the ceiling and air thick with the musty smell of stale tobacco and old paperbacks”

Frequent references to clothes and and other cultural signifiers: “[D]ressed in untucked oxford shirts and off-brand jeans, mingled around a rickety table packed with half-empty Jim Beam bottles”

Required mention of Ivy League degrees: “REBECCA CHAPMAN, who has a master of arts in English and comparative literature from Columbia University”; “Willie Osterweil, 25, an aspiring novelist who graduated magna cum laude from Cornell in 2009”

Concern about attractiveness of subjects: “Despite the fact that everyone was young and attractive, no one seemed to flirt”

Name-dropping like crazy

Read it and think: this could happen to you too, if you got caught at your most pretentious, or most style-conscious, or most snobby, and all of a sudden you, too, would become a symbol of everything that is wrong with everything.

Hmmm?

John W. Ryan writes:

Ohio history suggests that the vote on Issue 2 might predict a larger change in the state’s political climate. In 1958 working people were also campaigning for voters to reject Issue 2. That year, Issue 2 was a Right-to-Work law. Two thirds of all Ohioans voted against that issue. Voters also tossed out all the elected officials who had supported the anti-union initiative. It was a clean sweep that tamed anti-worker Ohio politicians for years. But one need not look back 50 years to know how these out of touch politicians might be punished now. Polls show that the majority of voters will punish legislators who continue to press issues that were in SB5, even the more “popular” parts of it. Just look to this year’s council elections in Cincinnati. All four council members who had supported Issue 2 lost their reelection bids. Perhaps Governor Kasich is lucky that he doesn’t come up for reelection until 2014.

Angie Schmitt writes:

Leading this philosophical sea change is a nonprofit group representing the state’s incorporated cities and suburbs: the Michigan Municipal League. The League recently published a manifesto for the state’s renewal titled “The Economics of Place.”

League CEO and Economics of Place author Dan Gilmartin explains, studies have shown that 65 percent of college-educated young people look, first, for an attractive place to live and, second, for a job.

I’d love to read the report, particularly to see how the questions were asked and who qualifies as a college educated young person, but I’m not ready to pay the $14.95 required to get a copy.

I can’t say anything about the former, but I’ll hazard an educated guess to suggest that anyone who has attended some educational institution beyond high school and who is between the ages of 18 and 30 qualifies as a college educated young person.

The reason I make the distinction is that if I am a recently degreed young person, I’d love to live in Hawaii, but I’m not likely to move there because I know the cost of living is high and the job opportunities (unless I’m an oceanographer) are low.

Kevin Costner not with standing, the philosophy of if we build it, he will come, just doesn’t make sense; but when you’re a not-for-profit selling downtown living, that may be the only tool in your kit.

Go back 50 years and take a look at San Jose, California. Does anyone really think that it became the center of Silicon Valley because it was an attractive place to live?

Eliot Spitzer writes:

During the deepest, darkest period of the financial cataclysm, the CEOs of major banks maintained in statements to the public, to the market at large, and to their own shareholders that the banks were in good financial shape, didn’t want to take TARP funds, and that the regulatory framework governing our banking system should not be altered. Trust us, they said. Yet, unknown to the public and the Congress, these same banks had been borrowing massive amounts from the government to remain afloat. The total numbers are staggering: $7.7 trillion of credit—one-half of the GDP of the entire nation. $460 billion was lent to J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley alone—without anybody other than a few select officials at the Fed and the Treasury knowing. This was perhaps the single most massive allocation of capital from public to private hands in our history, and nobody was told. This was not TARP: This was secret Fed lending.

Kevin Drum writes:

So can we afford to reduce defense spending to 2007 levels? Of course we can. The world is not more dangerous today than it was in 2007, and there’s no apriori reason it should cost more to defend the security of the United States today than it did in 2007. We might spend that money differently, of course. Perhaps the Pentagon will decide it would rather have a thousand more drones instead of a single additional supercarrier group. That might well make sense since the mission of supercarrier groups is becoming fuzzier all the time in an era of primarily asymmetric warfare.

The only reasonable argument for a large military budget is a large military and the only reasonable argument for a large military is a large military threat to the homeland of the United States of America. No such threat exists and has not existed for than more twenty years.

If we fear that such a military threat might occur here’s how to deal with it: institute a universal, no deferments, draft of all American citizens upon their 18th birthday or their graduation of high school, no exceptions. Commit all draftees to six months of military training and then release them to an active reserve force with a mandatory two-week training requirement each year.

Design and fund an active-duty military capable of defending the country for 90 days and stockpile sufficient weapons to arm and equip the active reserve.

If we do this, I guarantee that we will not go to war for two reasons: first, our enemies will know we are prepared to fight; and second, Congress, under extreme pressure from constituents who don’t want to see their sons and daughters die in another bout of empiricism will not authorize anything military action short of Constitutionally declared war.

End of problem.

[Update @ 0901: I also posted this as comment to the original piece.]

Via Time…

The Book Job…

Via Mano Singham…

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Eight years ago I asked, “Who should schedule when firefighters are on duty – the city or the fire union?

I guess they haven’t figured it out yet at city hall. Or they don’t want to figure it out.

The latest audit that revealed the disgusting waste of city tax funds because firefighters are using gimmicks to not work should rate a special grand jury. Not only should heads roll but people may have to go to prison. They have essentially been robbing the city blind. For years.

Safety Director Martin Flask should immediately resign or be fired. Same goes with Fire Chief Paul Stubbs. Mayor Frank Jackson by making excuses Continue Reading »

John Heilemann writes:

Which is to say, in most respects, it was just another day at OWS. But in one way it was novel: This was the first and only demonstration to date, as far as I can determine, aimed directly at Barack Obama.

The proximate cause of the protest was a proposed settlement between a coalition of state attorneys general and the country’s biggest banks in the months-long state and federal investigation of widespread mortgage fraud—in particular, “robosigning.” A few days earlier, Berger had heard that a deal worth north of $25 billion was close at hand; the White House and the Justice Department were leaning hard on the A.G.’s to get onboard.

To Berger, the settlement seemed a travesty—a craven cash-for-immunity deal. So Berger proposed and helped plan the Foley Square march. Because of the arrests, its theme got lost in the scant media coverage it drew. But if you were there, that theme was plain, from the enormous papier-mâché rendering of 44 to a sign bearing the slogan OBAMA, DON’T BE WALL STREET’S PUPPET.

More from the East County Magazine and NBC San Diego…

The invisible soul was crying to break free
the little girl peered in the glass gingerly
a woman stared back, her eyes became me
The three of us stopped and my heart skipped a beat
The little girl and the woman became complete
The little girls skin was broken and scarred
The woman in the mirror held dreams in the stars
The pressure on the little girls chest was lifted
She started to breathe, her lungs less constricted
The woman looked friendly, her smile was warm
The invisible soul became calm in its storm
Three souls clicked into place for a moment
And they breathed together, deeply

From The Mirror by Laura Kate Callaway…

I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. New York City Mayor Megalomaniac Michael Bloomberg.

Way to defend your fief, Mickey. Yes, I know, as a member of the 1 percent, you don’t give a feck what I think.

Angela Saini made one case. Cory Doctorow makes yet another, and really scary, case.